The Imperfect Revolution by Gordon S. Barker

Author:Gordon S. Barker [Barker, Gordon S.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, United States, Civil War Period (1850-1877)
ISBN: 9781606350690
Google: tF46oargHKcC
Publisher: Kent State University Press
Published: 2010-01-15T00:36:28+00:00

CHAPTER 6

Anthony Burns’s St. Catharines

Safety under the “Lion’s Paw”

I stand as a freeman along the northern shore of Old Erie, the freshwater sea,

And it cheers my very soul to behold the billows roll

And to know as a man I am free

Old Master and mistress, don’t come after me,

For I won’t be a slave any more;

I’m under British law safe beside the lion’s paw

And he’ll growl if you come near me sure.

—Rev. Richard Ball

The Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 changed the meaning of the North for runaway slaves and free blacks. African Americans had long suffered from endemic racism in the free states and from the plethora of discriminatory laws against blacks that such attitudes produced. These laws reflected in part white workers’ fears of a flood of low-wage black laborers from the South. But at least blacks in the North had their freedom—however limited or tenuous it may have been. Yet when Senator Stephen Douglas guided the Compromise of 1850 through Congress, most observers viewed the new fugitive slave legislation as a major concession to Southern slaveholders. Antislavery activists in the North were especially alarmed. They denounced the act as proof that slavery was extending its tentacles into the free states. Rather than diminish gradually, as many Americans had expected, the peculiar institution now seemed poised for expansion.

In 1850, America took another giant step away from the course of events in Britain, where antislavery sentiment had risen steadily after Lord Mans-field’s Somerset decision in 1772 effectively abolished slavery in England.1 By the end of the eighteenth century, British public opinion had turned decidedly against slavery, and Britain officially ended its involvement in the still lucrative African slave trade in 1807. During the first decade of the nineteenth century, as cotton plantations using slave labor spread across the American South and new laws strengthened the institution’s grasp, British abolitionists stepped up their campaign against slavery in their country’s overseas possessions, helping to set the stage for imperial emancipation some three decades later.

When President Millard Fillmore’s administration began enforcing the new fugitive slave legislation in September 1850, blacks and antislavery whites assailed provisions in the law that were designed to increase the efficiency of slave catching, arguing that they stacked the cards in favor of slaveholders. The act denied alleged fugitives the right of habeas corpus, excluded fugitive testimony in hearings before federally appointed slave law commissioners, and introduced hefty fines and jail terms for persons who assisted runaways. Critics also noted that the new legislation provided slave law commissioners with a financial incentive to rule in favor of individuals claiming ownership of alleged fugitives. When they validated a slaveholder’s claim, slave law commissioners received fees twice that to which they were entitled when they ruled in favor of the purported fugitive.

Northern blacks maintained that the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 created an open season for slave hunting throughout the free states; that perception boosted the number of fugitive slaves fleeing to Canada. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, most blacks

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